Dissent at Table 40

When the big White House Conference on Education finally broke up, most of the delegates headed for home convinced of a job well done. Not so, prestigious Joel Henry Hildebrand, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of California, president of the American Chemical Society, blunt critic of what he calls the declining intellectual standards of U.S.

schools. Last week Dr. Hildebrand issued his own minority report on why he thinks the conference was a flop.

Watchful Men. First of all, though one-third of the delegates were professional educators, "college professors, who must further train for intellectual leadership much of the product of the schools, and who know also something about why college graduates avoid schoolteaching, were not in evidence." Worse still: the final reports to the conference on the six topics discussed did nothing more than echo an educationist party line.

"At every stage," said Chemist Hildebrand, "there were watchful men who honestly believe more in 'social competency' than in grammar and arithmetic, and, because good-natured committeemen try to fix up their reports so as to make every member happy, anything seriously critical of certain doctrines and practices largely responsible for the present deplorable and dangerous situation [in the schools] could not get through." In discussing Topic i--What should our schools accomplish?--six members out of eleven at Hildebrand's Table No. 40 flatly declared that the schools are trying to do too much. But when the final report on school goals came out with 14 vague and diffuse points--e.g., respect and appreciation for human values--the six were moved to protest. The 14 points, they said, "were presented with no analysis of their relative importance or their practicability . . . The blanket praise given to 'the schools' as 'better than ever before' is not consistent with the catastrophic decline in many schools of science and mathematics, subjects now basic to the very survival of Western civilization." Vested Interest. Topic 4--How can we get enough good teachers, and keep them? --got much the same sort of treatment.

Table 40 had protested that "many persons, otherwise well qualified [to teach], are repelled by courses in education that they regard as repetitive, doctrinaire, or inferior in intellectual quality." But this idea, says Hildebrand, never showed up in the final report--and, he thinks, with good reason. "The requirement, first, of 18 or more units of education for certification as a 'qualified' teacher, and then of summer-session credits therein in order for the harassed teacher to get raises in salary, provides positions for a vast number of professors of education, jobs that they, of course, do not intend to see jeopardized." All in all, concluded Hildebrand, the conference completely failed to come to grips with the real crisis in education. A proper attack on that crisis "would not have brought forth '14 points' with no analysis of -their relative importance, where subjects like chemistry or grammar' that can be taught, are confused with 'attitudes,' such as 'respect and appreciation for human values . . .' that can be caught by association with those who have them, but not taught. In place of the complacent statement that 'the schools are doing the best job in their history in teaching these skills,' it might have been possible to arouse among the participants some of the true, but unperceived implications of the 14th point: 'An awareness of our relationships to the world community.' Our relation to the world cornmunity may easily become that of a subject nation if we can do no better than we did in the White House Conference to achieve schooling adapted to a world situation which calls for our utmost in trained intelligence and moral fiber."

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